


Fowl Play

by TourmalineGreen



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, cozy holiday fluff, domestic cabin life, hux is a goose, just go with it, let it happen, okay, that fucking goose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 12:21:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16872816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen
Summary: For the following prompt, which cracked me up for a solid five minutes when I first read it: "Rey and Ben/Kylo in an established relationship, they live on a farm or something and have a goose that they plan to eat for Christmas. It doesn’t quite go as planned though, and the score is Humans 0 Goose 3 … they have to admire it’s pluck (hahaha) and they decide to let it live. They name it Hux."





	Fowl Play

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AmberDread](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmberDread/gifts).



_(Thank you to autonomee and azuwrite for the wonderful moodboards!)_

* * *

 

There wasn’t much point in naming your dinner, Rey thought, rather pragmatically, as she looked out through the wavy glass window set over her sink. No point in becoming affectionate toward it, especially when the creature in question had a tiny, pathetic brain approximately the same size as its tiny, beady eye as well as an attitude more befitting its aggressive dinosaur ancestry than its current small, feathered body.

Hence, the pig had a name, and the chickens each had names, and the goats had names, but the goose—that damn goose—remained nameless.

Well, that’s not, strictly speaking, true. The goose got called plenty of things, mostly by Ben. ‘That Fucking Goose’ was the usual one, but… there were other, more colorful epithets. ‘Orange-Beaked Asshole’ and ‘Fucking Feathered Fuck’ were runners-up.

Rey shut off the tap and smiled as she reached over to the towel rack to dry her hands; she had just caught sight of her husband coming up from his trip down to the river. He had gone down there earlier in the afternoon to try and catch something for dinner, and now she saw him, with a cluster of iridescent fish hanging from one hand, and his rod held by the other. Rey smiled, feeling a thrill of familiar desire at the sight of him in his mucking-around clothes: The soft-knit, woolen sweater in army-green clung to his muscular frame, and the dark charcoal work pants moved with his beautiful legs as he tromped back up through the field from the edge of the woods.

They would have fish for dinner, then. And after, Rey thought, she would have _him_ for dessert.

Ben came up to the house; she could hear him outside, on the front porch, putting his fishing gear away and taking off his muddy boots. When he came inside, he found her crouched before the fire, feeding it a new log. He smiled at her, and Rey smiled back.

“Looks like the catch was good,” she said, standing up and wiping her hands briskly on her leggings, dusting off the remnants of bark and dried splinters of wood from the log. In the hearth, the new wood snapped and crackled cheerily.

Ben held up the fish for her inspection. “Yes. Two, but they’re big. I was thinking I could... bake them, maybe. Stuffed trout—”

“I can—”

“I’ve got it tonight,” Ben said, with a smile. He raked his clean, non fish-having hand back through his hair, and gave her a look that suggested more than just the oven was going to be warmed up. Possibly before dinner, the way his eyes traced up and down her body. “You put your feet up.”

“Alright,” Rey said. She sat down, curled into the right side—her side, after their years together, here in this place—of the sofa, the side closest to the hearth. Her book was there, waiting for her on the side table, and the plush, cozy blanket, too, which she drew up over her legs.

She tucked herself up under that blanket, and picked up her book, but it was almost impossible to read it or focus on anything when her husband was in the vicinity. Ben was just… such a presence in the cabin, the size of him, every sensory detail which tugged at her awareness. Rey loved to watch him move; he was, as ever, distracting.

“Christmas is in three days,” Ben said, in that casual way which Rey knew was something more than totally off-hand.

“It is,” Rey agreed, with a glance to the mantle, where their stockings—red and white fair-isle, trimmed with festive green—hung side by side. There was a garland of lit greenery, draped above them. Then down, to the pile of neatly-wrapped presents, his and hers, which sat to the side of the hearth. They hadn’t cut a tree down this year; what was the point, when they could look outside and see thousands of them?

“I was thinking we could cook that fucking—”

_“Ben—”_

“—goose,” Ben finished, with a glance over his broad shoulder; something between a smile and a smirk on his sweet mouth. “That’s why we got it, after all.”

Rey sighed, meeting his look with a saucy expression of her own. “You’re only saying that because it tried to bite you again.”

“Maybe.”

Rey laughed at the low, faintly sullen tone of his answer, and curled her toes under the blanket. The fire crackled merrily in the hearth, filling the cabin with the scent of pine and sweet woodsmoke—not too overwhelming, just warm and familiar. This little two-room cabin they’d called home for the last few years was the closest thing to paradise, and thankfully, both of their jobs were remote and didn’t interfere too much with their sex lives.

“Alright,” Rey said, tucking her finger between the pages of her book to hold her spot. “We can… we can do that. I suppose you’re long overdue a grudge match with that thing.”

Ben laughed, once—a bark of a laugh. He set the fish down on the cutting board, and turned back to look at her, a sardonic look on his face. “A grudge match? It’s one goose; how hard could it be?”

* * *

Two days later, Ben sat in a puddle as the rain fell around him. White feathers rained down, too, sticking to his skin and clothes. He watched as that _fucking_ goose ran to the opposite side of the field, honking in… dare he say it… callous glee?

It was as if the foul fowl knew its demise was imminent. It had escaped his grasp, allowed itself to be cornered, then ducked between Ben’s legs at the very last minute. Ben had turned, his boots unexpectedly slipping on the mud, and then he’d been on his ass in a puddle.

Well.

Ben was a man, and that fucking goose was _not_ going to outsmart him.

He looked up; Rey, in the window, was holding a mug of tea. She smiled, and waved at him. Ben lifted his mud-drenched hand and waved back.

Better strategy was clearly needed.

* * *

“It’s taunting me,” Ben said, the whole cabin still reverberating from the force of the slammed front door. “That fucking—”

“Ben, if you track mud into the house, you’ll have worse things than a goose to deal with,” Rey said from over by the fridge. “Boots off.”

Ben nodded, and crouched down to tug at the mud-caked laces. “Maybe we’ll just… go into town and find a turkey.”

Rey, who had opened the fridge to take out the jug of juice, used the door to shield her affectionate eye-roll.

“It looks like the kind of goose who orchestrated the assassination of his father for political reasons,” Ben groused, laces getting more tangled with each passing second. “That’s the kind of goose who will shoot you when you’re unconscious.”

“Ben,” Rey closed the fridge and sighed, setting the juice on the counter, “geese don’t have thumbs.”

“He’d find a way.” Ben growled at the laces until they seemed to, at last, submit to his fingers. “I swear, that goose is evil. I’m sure he was one of those dictators who liked to shout on stage to a neatly-arranged mass of indoctrinated followers.”

Rey grinned. “Oh, really?”

“Yes,” Ben tucked his muddy boots up under the front bench, on the thick rubber tray-like mat they’d set there specifically for this purpose. “This goose… he clearly feels like he is destined to rule the whole farm. The planet. Maybe even the galaxy.”

Rey abandoned the juice, sauntering over in her leggings and sweater, reaching for her husband’s hand and tugging him back to the sink. Ben looked at her curiously, affectionately, as she ran the tap and carefully washed his hands.

“I like it when your hands are clean,” Rey said softly, as she towel-dried the thick digits. “I can come out and help catch him, if you want?”

“Mmm,” Ben’s eyes were warm on her skin; he bent his head and kissed the little bit of exposed skin between the strap of her bralette and the wide collar of her sweater.

The pair found their way to the sofa; it was slightly too short for Ben’s long frame to stretch out fully, but Rey sat down first, and tugged him down beside her.

“I hate that goose,” Ben said, engulfing her body in his strong arms. “I kind of want to kill it now, just on principle. With my hands around his neck...  That goose has… _evil_ in his eyes.”

Rey chuckled, and ran her fingers through her husband’s glossy dark hair. In response, Ben rolled over, nuzzling between her breasts.

Rey thrilled at his nearness, the solid, comforting weight of him, as he hands continued to play with his hair. “If this is what you’ve invented for the goose’s tragic backstory, I can’t wait to read your next short story.”

Ben made a nose that was somewhere between a frustrated groan and a growl. It was a source of constant amusement for the pair of them, the fact that they were both writers, but in such disparate fields; Rey, the technical writer, had been paired with Ben, the budding novelist, in an online course which had been a mandatory elective credit for her and fun, apparently, for him: Advanced Fiction Writing. Their approaches had been as different as Lord Byron and… Mary Roach. He’d assumed his partner, Rey, had been a guy who wasn’t taking the assignment seriously. She’d assumed _her_ partner, Ben, had been a pretentious dickbag who took life way too seriously. When they’d finally met in person, however…

Words hadn't been able to describe it. 

Now, the tugging of her fingers in his hair drew out yet another low, rumbly noise of contentment. “Let’s not eat the goose; I don’t even like the taste of goose.”

“Oh?” Rey shimmied a little beneath his comforting bulk. “What _do_ you like the taste of?”

Her husband looked up at her. Dark hair fell across his brow, doing very little to conceal the glint of mischief in his eyes. Slowly, deliberately, he opened his mouth, gently biting down on the curve of her sweater-covered breast without breaking eye contact. Rey made a muffled noise, and wriggled against him again, encouragingly.

“I like the way this tastes,” Ben said, quietly. His eyes dipped lower, and, pushing the edge of her sweatshirt up to reveal a bit of her bare stomach, he nipped softly there, too. “I like the way _this_ tastes…”

“ _Ben_ ,” Rey gasped, feeling him move lower yet, her hands still in his hair. “You can’t eat _me_ for Christmas dinner…”

“Mmm,” he said, tilting his head to give her a look of playful curiosity. “That’s too bad.”

“It is.” She nodded.

But his hands were still at her waist, and his eyes were still savoring every inch of her bare skin as if it was the first time he’d ever seen it. “What about Christmas Eve?”

* * *

The next day, when the little feathered fascist fuck— _”Ben”_ —had escaped their combined efforts for the third time, Rey sat with Ben in the mud, laughing and feeling the rain fall down around them. If the sight of her husband’s slicked-down hair was any indication, her own wasn’t much neater… and there were smears of mud on his forearms, a few welling-up bite marks from the goose’s attempts at defending himself.

“Zero for three,” Ben grumbled. The goose was… was it _laughing_ at him?

“Let’s just skip Christmas dinner,” Rey said, moving to straddle her filthy, mud-streaked husband, careless of the cold seeping into her own jeans. “Let’s have dessert first.”

Ben laughed, and shook his head. His hands came around her thighs, and he sat up as Rey wrapped her arms around his neck.

“We’ll have to get clean, before we can eat,” he said.

“Mmhmm,” Rey smiled, and kissed him on a cold, wet, mostly-clean cheek. “We should.”

Ben held her tight, feeling absurdly hard for a man soaking in ice-cold mud, in the rain, covered in goose-bites. Across the yard from them, the aforementioned goose honked. His raspy, distinctive honk was less of a proper goose noise and more of a… _hux_.

“Christmas is the season for giving,” Rey said, pushing back his wet hair with her dirty hands, neither of them caring particularly about it any longer. “Maybe we’ll just... let him live.”

Ben gave her a look, but before he could answer, the damned goose seemed to _hux_ its agreement from a very safe distance.

Ben rolled his eyes. Rey laughed. Then, her eyes grew bright. “Ben! It’s snowing!”

It was; the rain coming down around them had somehow transmuted itself into soft flakes of fluffy white, surrounding them with a delicate and ethereal mist. Already the mud-ruined ground looked as if it had been sprinkled with powdered sugar. Rey turned to glance at the cabin; dusted as it was with snow, it looked like a gingerbread house.

“It’s beautiful,” Ben said, his eyes never leaving Rey’s wonder-filled face.

If Hux the goose had any complaints about Ben carrying Rey back inside the house, he could hux them right at the snow, for all Ben cared. Inside, there was warm water, and soap, and hands intent on cleaning thoroughly disgusting, muddy skin. After, there was cocoa, and blankets, and the fire. Ben and Rey sat in front of the hearth, sharing an apple pie he’d baked yesterday and a bottle of champagne, and watched the snow fall until they became entirely too distracted by presents yet to open and gifts yet to be given.

Christmas had come at last. And all was right in their snowy, cozy corner of the world.


End file.
